Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL), a hospitality under the Tata Group is outlining an increase of 50 skill training centres across India by 2025, and skilling 1 lakh people by 2030, a company official said.
The online training will be in collaboration with Tata Consultancy Services, the leading IT services provider in the country.
IHCL has identified skilling as one of its focus areas under Paathya, which is its environmental, social, and corporate governance initiative.
Over 25 per cent of the 1 lakh individuals to be upskilled will be females, the official exuberated confidence.
Through the initiative, IHCL tries to play a role in closing the demand-supply gap of skilled workers in the hospitality segment, that has seen booming advancement in the last two years after the pandemic-induced lockdown of 2020.
“The industry has come back in a very strong way… In the last few quarters in terms of growth, (if it) is anything to go by, we are looking at a very robust path in front of us… The dearth of talent in the market also comes on the back of the fact that most of the hospitality companies are on a very aggressive growth path,” IHCL Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Gaurav Pokhariyal told PTI.
This was in response to a question on the present scenario of skilled manpower being available in the hospitality industry.
While a lot of manpower is present in rural regions, a there is a requirement for giving proper training for them to become industry-ready and employable, he said.
“That is what we have been trying to address through our skilling initiative at IHCL,” Pokhariyal added.
IHCL has selected the cause of employable manpower as part of its Paathya initiative, while discharging their role of training people from the marginalised sections of society.
“We had identified a target of 100,000 youth that we will be able to skill till 2030. We have been able to skill 12,500 people to date from 2020,” he said. The first few years after the pandemic occurred were sluggish for growth due to the Covid-19, but this number has now gone up with about 6,000 people skilled till now in the first three months of the year.
The entire initiative is for aiding individuals from the marginal sections of society and the inner parts of rural India, he said, adding that some of the challenges in these areas are for initiatives to teach people on the hospitality sector, and explaining that they have to leave their native places for employment opportunities post the training is over.
“So there has to be some form of migration that needs to happen,” he said, adding there is a perception conflict in the sector, that those employed in hospitality have to endure long hours and hardships in the industry, involving manual services.
For diversity purposes, Pokhariyal said, “We have a target of 25 per cent of women and I am sure that we will exceed 25 per cent by 2030.”
In terms of expanding skill training centres, Pokhariyal said, “By next year, we will move from existing 32 skilling centres to close to 50 skill centres across different parts of the country.”
Presently, large and small format skilling centres are present in 15 states across 25 cities.
The largest skill centre is in Guwahati, which upskills close to 300 people in a given fiscal.
IHCL is sequentially adding new skill centres in the tried-and-tested school classroom session format almost each quarter, Pokhariyal said.
“However, this year we realised that in order to be able to reach our target of 100,000, it is important that we actually have a more diversified partnership in order to be able to live to our expectations by 2030. We have tied up with TCS to do online training and we should be able to train 6,000 people going forward from next year onwards apart from adding on to our skill centres,” he said.
IHCL is partnering with Tata STRIVE; HHH — Head Held High Foundation; REACHA — Research and Extension Association for Conservation Horticulture and Agro-forestry; and VFS as part of its skilling push.
Pertaining to the rate of absorbing the skilled workforce so far, Pokhriyal said about 20 per cent are taken in by IHCL, with the overall placement rate at 75 per cent.
For staff-level recruits, the basic requirement in terms of educational qualification is 12th pass, while executive level employees must atleast be graduates, he said.
Addressing competition among skilled workers, Pokhariyal said the thin line which divided different sectors in the past seems to now blur, with more options to move across sectors.
“The manufacturing sector to a large extent today has realised the importance of the service aspect of business and started expanding on that aspect of business far too aggressively and that is where we tend to lose some of the talent that are available in the (hospitality) sector,” he added.
